Nightwatch test hooks | Developer Guide

Nightwatch provides the standard before/after and beforeEach/afterEach hooks to be used in the tests.

before, beforeEach, after, afterEach

The before and after will run before and after the execution of the test suite respectively, while beforeEach and afterEach are ran before and after each testcase (test step).

All methods have the Nightwatch instance passed as argument.

Example:

module.exports = {
  before : function(browser) {
    console.log('Setting up...');
  },
  

  after : function(browser) {
    console.log('Closing down...');
  },
  

  beforeEach : function(browser) {
    

  },
  

  afterEach : function(browser) {
    

  },
  

  'step one' : function (browser) {
    browser
     // ...
  },
  

  'step two' : function (browser) {
    browser
    // ...
      .end();
  }
};

In the example above the sequence of method calls will be as follows: before(), beforeEach(), "step one", afterEach(), beforeEach(), "step two", afterEach(), after().

Asynchronous before[Each] and after[Each]

All the before[Each] and after[Each] methods can also perform asynchronous operations, in which case they will require the callback passed as the second argument.

The done function must be called as the last step when the async operation completes. Not calling it will result in a timeout error.

Example with beforeEach & afterEach:

module.exports = {
  beforeEach: function(browser, done) {
    // performing an async operation
    setTimeout(function() {
      // finished async duties
      done();
    }, 100);
  },
  

  afterEach: function(browser, done) {
    // performing an async operation
    setTimeout(function() {
      // finished async duties
      done();
    }, 200);
  }
};

Controlling the `done` invocation timeout

By default the done invocation timeout is set to 10 seconds (2 seconds for unit tests). In some cases this might not be sufficient and to avoid a timeout error, you can increase this timeout by defining an asyncHookTimeout property (in milliseconds) in your external globals file (see below for details on external globals).

For an example, refer to the provided globalsModule example.

Explicitly failing the test

Failing the test intentionally in a test hook can be achieved by calling done with an Error argument:

module.exports = {
  afterEach: function(browser, done) {
    // performing an async operation
    performAsync(function(err) {
      if (err) {
        done(err);
        return;
      }
      // ...
    });
  }
};